AFTER THE FOX - MICHAEL THE FIRST (X2)

Movie characters and even full movies aren't the only things borrowed from the Cineverse and absorbed into the Toobworld Dynamic. Tropes - plot cliches - are sometimes taken so that I can make a particular crossover theory work.

Toobworld has a long tradition of "identical cousins", and that includes half brothers or sisters with a different parent. But thanks to "The Parent Trap", I also use the idea that twins can be separated due to divorce and each raised by a different parent. This sometimes leads to the twins having different last names.

I was in a big 'Burke's Law' phase last year, and right now I'm enjoying 'Perry Mason' on ME-TV. Each of them had one of those twins appearing on a recurring basis, and best of all both of them went into the same line of work!

These "twins" were played by Michael Fox.  And they are definitely two different men and not one guy who decided to change his name in 1963 (where the two series overlap.)  Dr. McLeod has a sense of humor on the job while Dr. Hoxie is of a more serious bent.

On 'Perry Mason', there were 25 episodes in which Fox either appeared or was heard as the coroner Dr. Hoxie. Actually, in almost half of those episodes Fox was simply listed as "Autopsy Surgeon". I'll come back to that later. But in another episode he was listed as Dr. Samuel Anders. I take that to mean that his full name was Samuel Anders Hoxie.

Meanwhile, on 'Burke's Law', Fox played Dr. George McLeod the coroner in 26 episodes. In this series, though, there was another glitch - three of those episodes had Fox playing "Police Officer". Here's the splainin I came up with for that - in Toobworld the rules are sometimes different than in the real world. One of these would be that the coroners sometimes had official police-style uniforms. On three occasions, Dr. McLeod wore his.

As children, Sam and George were separated when their parents divorced. Either one of them could have been raised by the mother and had his name changed once she remarried, with the new husband adopting the boy. If it was Sam, it could also be that the mother remarried twice and Sam ended up with both last names - "Anders" and "Hoxie". But more likely "Anders" is Sam Hoxie's middle name, one that came from the family name on one side of the family tree or the other. "Samuel Anders Hoxie" does sound pretty official.

Now as to Dr. Hoxie being listed as "Autopsy Surgeon".....

As long-time readers of Inner Toob might remember, I give no weight to the end credits on TV shows. Too often either they are wrong or they are just not relevant to the story which preceded those credits.

So we might as well assume that by "Autopsy Surgeon", he was still appearing as Dr. Samuel Anders Hoxie. However, he could just as easily have been appearing as his twin brother George McLeod, normally seen on 'Burke's Law'.

Michael Fox played many different characters in Toobworld. Some of them could be ancestors of these twin brothers, like the attorney he played in 'The Big Valley'. Others could be "identical cousins", like the veterinarian he played in an episode of 'Columbo'.

Or their Daddy was playing around. There would be a good reason that he ended up divorced......

Two for Tuesday!

BCnU!